Peter H. Seeberger studied chemistry in Erlangen (Germany) and completed a PhD in biochemistry in Boulder (USA). After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center Research in New York he advanced to tenured Firmenich Associate Professor of Chemistry at MIT. After six years as Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich he assumed positions as Director at the Max-Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam and Professor at the Free University of Berlin in 2009. In addition, he serves as honorary Professor at the University of Potsdam. He is a member of the governing bodies of the Max-Planck Society (“Senate”) and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (“Rat”).
Professor Seeberger’s research in theglycosciences, carbohydrate vaccine development and continuous flow synthesis of drug substances spans a broad range of topics from engineering to immunology and has been documented in over 500 peer-reviewed journal articles, four books, more than 40 patents, and more than 850 invited lectures. This work was recognized with more than 35 international awards from the US, Germany, Holland, Israel, Japan, Switzerland, the Philippines and international organizations. In 2013 he was elected to the Berlin-Brandenburg (Prussian) Academy of Sciences.
Peter H. Seeberger greatly supports the idea of open access publishing as the Editor-in-Chief of the Beilstein Journal Chemistry and serves on the editorial advisory boards of many other journals.
Through his work in the area of neglected diseases, Peter Seeberger has become involved in philanthropic causes. He is a co-founder of the Tesfa-Ilg “Hope for Africa” Foundation that aims at improving health care in Ethiopia that helped to build a bed-net factory, established an IT training center and an entrepreneurship program.
The research in the Seeberger laboratory has given rise to eight successful companies in the USA, Switzerland, Denmark and Germany.